Parental Alienation Syndrome in Italian legal judgments: an exploratory study

The present study highlights the characteristics of separated families in Italy for whom Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) has been diagnosed during court custody evaluations. The study analyzed the psychological reports of 12 court-appointed expert evaluations of families for whom PAS had been diagnosed. Twelve evaluations that did not receive the PAS diagnosis served as a control group. A specific coding system was used for data analysis. The results indicated that the alienating parents were always the parents who had custody of the children. Children who were diagnosed with PAS were predominantly the only child in the family, had identity problems and manifested manipulative behavior. The consultant in these cases suggested individual psychotherapy for the children and recommended foster care to the Social Services agency.     

Corneal‐Smart Phone: A novel method to intelligently estimate postmortem interval

The changes of postmortem corneal opacity are often used to roughly estimate the postmortem interval (PMI) in forensic practice. The difficulty associated with this time estimate is the lack of objective means to rapidly quantify postmortem corneal changes in crime scenes. This study constructed a data analysis model of PMI estimation and implemented an intelligent analysis system for examining the sequential changes of postmortem corneal digital images, named Corneal‐Smart Phone, which can be used to quickly estimate PMI. The smart phone was used in combination with an attachment device that provided a darkroom environment and a steady light source to capture postmortem corneal images. By segmenting the corneal pupil region images, six color features, Red (R), Green (G), Blue (B), Hue (H), Saturation (S), Brightness (V) and four texture features Contrast (CON), Correlation (COR), Angular Second Moment (ASM), and Homogeneity (HOM), were extracted and correlated with PMI model. The results indicated that CON had the highest correlation with PMI (R² = 0.983). No intra/intersubject variation in CON values were observed (p > 0.05). With the increase in ambient temperature or the decrease in humidity, the CON values were increased. PMI prediction error was <3 h within 36 h postmortem and extended to about 6–8 h after 36 h postmortem. The correct classification rate of the blind test samples was 82%. Our study provides a method that combines postmortem corneal image acquisition and digital image analysis to enable users to quickly obtain PMI estimation.